How does gravity change while getting further away from earth if you are in a rocket?

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How does gravity change while getting further away from earth if you are in a rocket?

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s an Inverse Square Law for gravitation, and it applies to all material bodies. It says that as you double the distance **from the center of mass**, the force of gravity goes down by four. As you quadruple the distance, the force goes down by sixteen, etc.

Whatever the factor of distance is, multiply by itself and that’s how much gravity goes down at that distance.

Newton first described it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation

But I think you might be asking a different question. You may be asking about the experience of *weight*, which is not the same question as what someone experiences on a rocket if it’s in orbit. You can have weightlessness by orbiting a body, and yet be close enough that the force is still very far from negligible.

In other words, even though the International Space Station experiences weightlessness by being in orbit around Earth, if it were held stationary, it would still have quite a bit of gravitational force.

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